Situational awareness is something everyone practices every day, some better than others
What does this mean?
Situational awareness is simply being able to be aware of the environment around you, anticipate and manage the changing environment around you and be able to make sound decisions to manage the changing environment.
Driving a motor vehicle or riding a bicycle is an excellent example of where drivers and riders alike need to constantly scan the environment around them to comprehend threats to safely navigate our roads and avoid accidents involving other drivers, cyclists, and/or pedestrians.
Our human senses of sight and sound are predominant in processing the environment around us, aided by technology in the form of cameras, distance measurement infrared, lane change indicators and proximity detectors.
Almost anyone can drive a car or ride a bike.
The difference between an average driver/rider and an excellent driver/rider is their ability to quickly register and process changes to the environment around them, to then decide on a course of action to avoid hazards and safely navigate using the best route available.
Critical Communications situation awareness
Listening to radio network and communications can provide an indication that something is not quite right, however that is labour intensive and requires considerable effort and resources to monitor networks 24 x 7.
This is where the VUpt software tool comes into its own.
VUpt has the ability to address key situational awareness elements, such as:
- Network Health Monitoring – channel availability, queuing, failed calls, congestion, signal strengths, interference, and traffic trending to highlight current and/or potential issues
- Optimal Spectrum Management – data analysis of sites and channel usage, traffic levels, congestion events and radio registrations
- Real time data analysis – ability to visually display the radio network situation providing the status of radio sites, links, and radio equipment together with geographic coverage and network loads
- Detection of threats – identification of “rogue” radio equipment, incorrect operation of base sites, trunking/roaming and interference
Mitigating risk
Many analytical systems in the marketplace focus on formal reporting of what has happened, not what is happening now.
A key strength of VUpt is its ability to gather, analyse and report radio network and communications conditions in real-time.
Real time analysis means that users can understand the scope, severity and impact of radio network and communication anomalies as issues occur.
VUpt provides relevant and timely information that can be communicated to key stakeholders so that a response can be co-ordinated to quickly resolve the situation.
Additionally VUpt provides a “forensic analysis” capability – the gathering, analysis and reporting of data enabling a review of circumstances leading up to and during any reported incident.
Historical data is extremely important in baselining normal radio network and communications working conditions, enabling performance to be tracked to provide “trending patterns” to anticipate potential risks and solutions in the future.
Summary
Situational Awareness is a key to having an accurate and current understanding of your critical communications assets and networks, being alerted quickly to anomalies that could seriously impact your operations and having a robust process to make informed, insightful decisions to reduce and/or eliminate the impact of issues.
